Owen White - The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria

For most of the twentieth century, Algeria was the fourth-biggest wine producer in the world. By the 2010s, the three leading producers were the same as in 1900: France, Italy, and Spain. Algeria no longer placed anywhere near the top twenty.

Underlying these basic facts is an extraordinary example of the capacity of modern European imperialists to transform lands in their own image. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, settlers from countries on the European side of the Mediterranean profited from the access to land created by Frances conquest of Algeria to plant tens of thousands of hectares of grapevines. As the rows of vines lengthened, they gave new definition to the imperial edifice known as French Algeria. Wine became the colonys primary export, making fortunes for some while also drawing large numbers of Algerian Muslims into salaried labor. Some of those Algerian workers would eventually help bring French Algeria to a bloody end. Independent Algeria, a Muslim-majority country with a substantial wine industry, then had to decide how far it should undo the transformations the colonists had wrought.

Wine was so central to the economic life of French Algeria, the most important component of the worlds second-largest empire, that it can be used to trace the rise and fall of the colony itself. That is exactly what this book sets out to do.

To study a colonized territory in terms of its rise and fall is to risk embracing a clich of writing about empire. Some historians criticize the rise-and-fall paradigm for reducing complex power dynamics to a simple parabola, as if empires were subject to the law of gravity. As I researched the story of wine in Algeria from the start of the French conquest in 1830 through independence in 1962 and the half-century or so beyond, however, the arc of the production figures came to look very much like a rough measure of the strength of Frances imperial influence.

The chronological structure of the following chapters should make the imperial trajectory clear. Despite the resources deployed in support of military invasion and European settlement in Algeria, the colonys early progress was halting and fragile. But it seemed clear to many that viticulture (the cultivation of grapevines) stood a very good chance of success on the slopes and plains that lay within about sixty kilometers of the Mediterranean. Settlers wide-scale adoption of wine production later in the century placed the colony on a much firmer footing and went along with a doubling of the European population, from about 300,000 in 1870 to 600,000 in 1900. A new wave of vine planting after World War I coincided with what could be seen as the apogee of French Algeria around the time of its centenary in 1930. Though the wine industry maintained its importance thereafter, it faced increasing challenges from rural flight, labor protest, the hardships imposed by World War II, and, ultimately, the nationalist insurrection that catalyzed the end of French Algeria. After independence, wine was the most obvious vestige of the colonial economy until a concerted effort to reduce its prominence (and Frances hold over Algeria) in the 1970s.